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[Smac Planner] Enable goal orientation non-specificity

Open SteveMacenski opened this issue 1 year ago • 10 comments

Some users have asked for a way to compute feasible paths to the goal without considering orientation. Since they're feasible paths, there's no "real" way to do this since we need to know the target orientation to make sure its drivable

However, we can brute force this internally by making the check for isGoal() consider not just the XY,Yaw bin but all Yaw bins in an XY position. That gets us part of the way there. The other half is in the analytic expansions that actually computes the way to the goal and knows things about the orientation. Each expansion would need to check for each Yaw bin at the goal also to check if any of them are valid (and use the shortest, valid one).

This comes at an increased compute cost obviously, especially for analytic expansions. However its far cheaper than the alternatives some users have proposed that involve multiple entirely separate planning cycles.

While this is not something Open Navigation is likely to work on directly in the near-term future (except by sponsor request or contracting) this is a good potential community contribution with a clear plan laid out above to accomplish it.

SteveMacenski avatar Aug 31 '23 18:08 SteveMacenski